George Gaynes (1917–2016)

The actor George Gaynes has died at the age of ninety-eight. The New York Times has an obituary. It omits mention of Gaynes’s role as Arthur Feldman — old friend, suitor, and, finally, husband of Florence Bickford (Allyn Ann McLerie), who played the mother of Molly Dodd (Blair Brown) in the television series The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd . I didn’t know until reading the Times obituary that Gaynes and McLerie were real-life partners, married in 1953.

The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd is an abiding preoccupation in our household. Here’s to all its company.

Related reading
All OCA Molly Dodd posts (Pinboard)

“Go buy some pencils”

Siegfried N. Lodwig, a retired professor of chemistry and mathematics, argues for the simplest tool of thought:

The fundamental technology of the pencil is as useful today as it was in the year of its invention, 1662. No, I’m not a Luddite. I just want to urge that we teach students to use a hammer to drive a nail. A pile driver is not the correct tool to drive a nail. Go buy some pencils for your students.

Lodwig’s thinking make me think of my own antipathy to the word-processor as a tool for writing. I stand by what I wrote in 2011: “I consider a word-processing window a hostile workplace.” Writing is not word-processing. There are better tools for putting words together.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

[Difficult to say that the pencil was invented in 1662. But Wikipedia says that “the first attempt to manufacture graphite sticks from powdered graphite was in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1662.”]

Recently updated

Who Donne it John Milton, as The New Republic now acknowledges.

Recently updated

Rachel’s tips for success in college Ten years later, my daughter Rachel adds one more tip.

[How come? I linked to Rachel’s post earlier today. She read it and decided to say something more.]

Who Donne it

[Ouch.]

My friend Stefan Hagemann pointed me to a paragraph in Branka Arsić’s “Henry David Thoreau’s Magical Thinking,” a piece that came online a week ago at The New Republic ,  adapted from Arsić’s book Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau , published last month by Harvard University Press. Stefan didn’t tell me what to look for, but I found it anyway:

In that question, birds are employed in the same way as nature in John Donne’s “Lycidas,” a poem whose parts Thoreau copied in one of his very early commonplace books.

Ouch. The mistake gives new life to a question my friend Rob Zseleczky once heard someone ask a professor: “Milton: didn’t he write Chaucer?” Well, yes. But Donne wrote Milton.

The Bird Relics version of the sentence mentions neither Donne nor Milton:

In that question, on Sherman Paul’s understanding, birds are employed in the same way as nature in “Lycidas,” a poem whose parts Thoreau copied in one of his very early commonplace books.

Anyone can make a mistake. Anyone involved in preparing this piece for The New Republic could have added Donne’s name — the writer, an editor at the Press or the magazine, an intern putting in a link to the text of “Lycidas.” (That text is prefaced by the name John Milton.) What’s remarkable is that no one noticed along the way, at least not anyone with the authority to make a correction. But Stefan noticed, and invited me to notice. So thanks, Stefan.

*

8:57 p.m.: The New Republic now recognizes John Milton as the author of “Lycidas.”

[Stefan Hagemann has made many appearances in these pages. He wrote one of OCA’s two guest posts: How to answer a professor. The other guest post is by my daughter Rachel: Rachel’s tips for success in college.]

Mary Shelley: “a great and sudden change”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

This sentence jumped out at me last night.

Also from Frankenstein
“A godlike science” (On learning a language)

June Fine (1932–2016)

[June Fine, probably in the 1980s.]

Elaine’s mother June died peacefully this morning at the age of eighty-three. June was a courageous and creative woman who lived with considerable physical pain and ample reserves of humor. She contracted juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at the age of eight and braved its effects for the rest of her life, relying on nothing more than aspirin as a counter-agent. When she was no longer able to play the flute, she turned to painting. When she was no longer able to paint or write (macular degeneration), she turned to collage. When she could no longer see, she became an indefatigable reader of audiobooks. (Most recently, Moby-Dick and Don Quixote .) She was always an indefatigable NPR fan. She wanted to live long enough to cast an absentee ballot for Bernie Sanders in the Massachusetts presidential primary, a matter of great importance to her. But the ballot she requested was lost in the mail or never sent.

June was independent, sometimes to a fault. It’s a great consolation to our family that in the last two years she gracefully accepted help when she could no longer manage daily life on her own. We saw June last weekend in Boston (for what we knew would be the last time) and had a wonderful visit, with some music, some talk about her paintings and her writing, and a story. Elaine read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Pen and the Inkwell” to her mother, as her mother had read Andersen’s stories to her many years ago.

Elaine has written about her mother here.

Valentine’s Day

[C. 1884. Found at The Graphics Fairy.]

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Free advice

Hillary Clinton, in the last two debates: “A vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS.” “I do not believe a vote in 2002 is a plan to defeat ISIS in 2016.”

What Bernie Sanders could have said in response:

“The Secretary is correct: a vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS in 2016. But voting to authorize military action against Iraq, as you did in 2002, Madam Secretary, suggests that you lack the judgment necessary to develop an effective plan to defeat ISIS in 2016. On the most important foreign-policy question of the last forty years, you made the wrong choice. In 2016 your insistence on a no-fly zone in Syria is also the wrong choice. We cannot afford to get caught in another quagmire in the Middle East. And a no-fly zone would be the first step into another quagmire.”

Pretty good, I think.

Some rock

[Nancy , November 7, 1955. From Random Acts of Nancy .]

That’s some rock. Context: here. But especially here.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)